In reading through Gary Taubes’ book Good Calories, Bad Calories I came upon the following dialog that I found all too familiar. It took place in 1973 during the first hearing of George McGovern’s Senate Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs. A number of speakers made presentations on the adverse effects of carbohydrates on human health. British nutritional researcher John Yudkin was one of the presenters.

Yudkin blamed heart disease exclusively on sugar, and he was equally adamant that neither saturated fat nor cholesterol played a role. He explained how carbohydrates and specifically sugar in the diet could induce both diabetes and heart disease, through their effect on insulin secretion and the blood fats known as triglycerides. McGovern now struggled with the difficulty of getting some consensus on these matters.

“Are you saying that you don’t think a high fat intake produces the high cholesterol count?” McGovern asked Yudkin. “Or are you even saying that a person with a high cholesterol count is not in danger?”

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Fiesta – a long time Santa Barbara tradition – starts tonight, and lasts through Sunday. My bride long ago signed us up to provide a charity event for the Choral Society tonight at our house. I’ve been dragooned into helping get everything together for this Fiesta feast, which is NOT low-carb. One can follow a low-carb diet and still partake of much of the food, but not all. And certainly not the dessert: capirotada, a northern New Mexican bread pudding, which is the best bread pudding I’ve ever put in my mouth. One of my jobs today was to caramelize the sugar for this treat, which I will definitely eat a little of. I’ll take some pictures and share.

In order to help my beloved wife I’ve had to pretty much abandon my blogging duties today. I’m in the middle of a long post that I think everyone will find interesting. I’ll be back at it tomorrow.

One of the great things about coming home from Europe is that I get to chow down on MD’s home cooking once again. One of her specialties is Frenched rack of lamb. Here is a photo of my dinner plate night before last.

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We made it back without a hitch. It’s only fair since I savaged Continental for its part in our fiasco getting to Europe to give them credit where credit is due. All the Continental flights – Edinburgh to Newark; Newark to LAX – left on time and arrived early. And all our baggage made the trip with us. We had a three hour plus layover in Newark, which we spent in the Continental President’s Club. I had always heard that the Newark President’s Club was the bomb, so I was looking forward to spending some time there. Let me tell you, it ain’t shucks up to the side of the Virgin lounge in LAX, not to mention the one at Heathrow. The Newark lounge is big, really big, but aside from size, it’s not much different from any other VIP lounge.

We’ve gone through the mountain of mail and messages that always lay in wait for anyone coming home from a long vacation. And we’ve finally decompressed from the trip and have shed our jet lag. And best of all, I have reliable internet service for the first time in several weeks. So, I’m back in the blogging saddle. It’s good to be home.

Edinburgh Castle at dusk just above our hotel.

We’re here in Edinburgh and have been for the past couple of days. But – as with this entire European trip – I’ve encountered internet access problems. Every hotel we’ve stayed in has advertised that it has wifi internet service. Problem is that half (or more) of the time the service is down or the service is only available in the lobby, which can be a real pain in the rear. In all the hotels in which we’ve stayed the internet service has cost anywhere from $18 to $30 per day.

The next time I come over here I’m going to make sure that the hotels I reserve have internet service in the room and for a reasonable fee. I didn’t know the right questions to ask this time. The last time we were here, we were in Prague, Budapest, and Vienna. The first two had great internet service in the rooms at a reasonable cost; I had a problem in Vienna, but we were in a crummy hotel, so I didn’t think much about it. We had nice hotels throughout this trip, and I’m really surprised that we’ve had so much trouble using the internet.

We leave tomorrow for the US. I don’t know that I will get all the comments that have stacked up since I last had access before I hit the rack. We’ve got to be out of here at a little before 6 AM tomorrow and it’s now about 10:30 PM. I’ll have plenty of time in the airport lounge tomorrow before the flight (and, presumably, I’ll have internet service) to catch up.

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